Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an influential champion of women’s rights for more than half a century. She was introduced to the reform movement by her husband, abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton. (At their 1840 wedding, they omitted the word “obey” from the vows; for their honeymoon, they went to the World’s Antislavery Convention.) With abolitionist Lucretia Mott, Stanton organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—the first U.S. convention on women’s rights. She drafted the convention’s famed Declaration of Sentiments and, despite controversy, insisted that it assert women’s right to vote.

In the 1860s, after her seven children were grown, Stanton became a renowned lecturer on woman suffrage. With Susan B. Anthony she founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and served as its president for more than twenty years (1869–90). Stanton was also a capable writer; she collaborated on three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881–85) with Anthony and Matilda Gage, and wrote the biblical commentary The Woman’s Bible (1895) and an autobiography, Eighty Years and More (1898).